Recalling the days after Challenger

Space shuttle exploded after liftoff in 1986, killing all seven crew members

Technical, organizational flaws

`Hard questions' helped NASA evolve, many say

The loss of Columbia

February 02, 2003|By Jean Marbella | Jean Marbella,SUN NATIONAL STAFF

On a similarly bright winter morning 17 years ago, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing the seven astronauts aboard in a Y-shaped plume of smoke and leaving the famously swaggering National Aeronautics and Space Administration rocked to its core.

"It really shook up NASA and woke up NASA," said former astronaut Sally Ride, the first woman in space and a member of the commission that investigated the Challenger accident. "It had gotten a little bit complacent."

Today, as NASA confronts yesterday's disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia and the loss of its crew of seven, the agency finds itself under scrutiny once more - from within as well as without.

FOR THE RECORD - It was incorrectly reported in yesterday's Sun that astronaut Sally Ride was the first woman in space. In fact, she was the first American woman to go into space. On June 16, 1963, Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.The Sun regrets the error.

"There's a lot of soul-searching that goes on because accidents are not supposed to happen," Roger Launius, NASA's chief historian, said yesterday. "Anytime an accident happens, whether it's Apollo 1 [in 1967] or the Challenger in 1986, or now, there is a major review of all the policies and the asking of the hard questions. It's already true in this case as well."

As after the Apollo 1 accident - in which three astronauts were killed in a fire that broke out during a launch pad test - an investigation was launched into what caused the explosion of the Challenger, which was bound on the space shuttle program's 25th mission and carried a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, as part of its crew.

After the explosion Jan. 28, 1986, President Ronald Reagan quickly appointed a blue-ribbon commission - which included several astronauts besides Ride, leading scientists and aeronautical experts - to investigate the cause and recommend remedies to prevent another such accident.

The panel inspected documents, examined large amounts of debris recovered off the coast of Cape Canaveral and called dozens of key figures for questioning. It concluded that a dual layer of flaws - technical and organizational - contributed to the disaster.

The technical problem was with the rubbery O-ring seals on the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters. The rings were supposed to prevent hot gases from escaping through the joints connecting the rocket segments. But in the 36-degree weather at Cape Canaveral that morning - 15 degrees colder than during any previous launch - the seals lost their resilience. The gases leaked out and sparked an explosion of the space shuttle's external fuel tank.

But the institutional flaws were perhaps even more troubling: Several engineers, concerned about how the O-rings would perform in cold weather, argued against launching the Challenger during Florida's unseasonably low temperatures - to no avail. The commission concluded that NASA's decentralized structure diffused accountability and prevented concerns such as those raised by the engineers from reaching the space agency's top decision makers.

The work of the Rogers Commission - named after its chairman, William P. Rogers, a former secretary of state and U.S. attorney general - led to extensive changes at NASA. Not only was the space shuttle redesigned, but also the agency's top management was shaken up, and just a few upper level administrators kept their jobs.

Although the cause of yesterday's disaster is unknown, NASA observers said yesterday that they would be surprised if investigators would find similar problems, either technical or within NASA management. The shuttle has undergone extensive modifications, particularly in the solid rocket boosters, as has NASA's leadership.

"The shuttle that was flying yesterday was not the same shuttle that was flying before Challenger. It's not your mother's Oldsmobile," said Howard E. McCurdy, a professor at American University's School of Public Affairs who has written extensively on NASA's organizational culture. "And the upper management changed considerably after Challenger.

"There's a much more realistic assessment of risk now," McCurdy said. "They do a much more rigorous job."

The credit for much of that change goes to the Rogers Commission, whose members included Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 commander and first man on the moon, and Chuck Yeager, the test pilot who first broke the sound barrier.

Although the commission conducted hundreds of interviews and studied thousands of pages of documents, it was perhaps best known for a simple yet devastating demonstration. The test was orchestrated by one member, theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, during an otherwise routine hearing Feb. 11, 1986.

As a piece of O-ring material was being passed among the commission members, Feynman asked for some ice water. Feynman, a 1965 Nobel laureate for physics, dropped the material in the water, fished it out and squeezed it. The sample failed to spring back to shape, showing that when exposed to low temperatures for even a few seconds, it would not be able to perform its vital task of containing a rocket booster's intensely hot gases.